In the Community

The Queens Museum is located next to one of the most diverse, vibrant, dense, fast growing, and predominantly immigrant neighborhoods in New York City: Corona, Queens. To address our uniquely diverse audiences and the challenges they face, the Museum has long understood the urgent need to work with our neighbors to engage critically in issues of neighborhood development in our schools, parks, streets, and in precious recreational spaces. Over the past decade, the Museum has been working to ensure that community residents are involved in the envisioning, production, programming, and maintenance of public spaces and amenities. Through a series of creative engagement initiatives and with the support of our full-time community organizers, we actively leverages our resources to help build the leadership capacity of Corona residents to participate actively in civic institutions.

This page documents the ways in which we have moved beyond the walls of our galleries to address issues in surrounding neighborhoods that range from health care and public space access, to neighborhood identity, immigrant rights, and language access. For several years we’ve also been engaged in long-term, socially-collaborative art projects in Queens, including the development and programming of Corona Plaza, Immigrant Movement International Corona (IMI Corona) an offsite storefront immigrant education, arts, and activism center. We also partnered with Queens College’s Art Department to launch Social Practice Queens, a graduate program in socially engaged art, as well as with ArtBuilt Mobile Studios, to house arts residencies in a custom-built, eco-friendly mobile art studio in public parks and plazas.